Incontinence is a condition in which there is an uncontrolled release of discharges or evacuations. Urinary incontinence refers to loss of bladder control resulting in involuntary or uncontrolled urination. Other forms of incontinence include faecal or bowel incontinence.
There is a range of recognised forms of incontinence. Stress incontinence, also known as effort incontinence, refers to involuntary loss of continence associated with coughing, sneezing, lifting, straining or other physical exertion. Urge incontinence is involuntary loss of urine coupled with a strong desire to urinate. Overflow incontinence refers to involuntary loss of continence associated with a chronically distended and overfull bladder. Dribble incontinence refers to a leakage of urine without warning or provocation. Persons suffering from dribble incontinence often need to wear protective pads or diapers throughout the day and night. Functional incontinence refers to when a person recognises the need to urinate but cannot physically do so due to factors such as limited mobility.
Treatment options for incontinence can include behaviour management, medication and surgery. In circumstances where treatment is not available or unsuccessful the only option available is to address the incontinence events themselves. Such methods for addressing incontinence include the sufferer wearing an absorbent pad or diaper.
Because most sufferers of incontinence tend to be elderly or suffering from some form of disability a significant proportion of patients in care institutions such as hospitals, nursing homes, aged care facilities and geriatric institutions are sufferers of incontinence. Furthermore, a significant proportion of patients in care of such facilities suffer from incontinence on a regular basis.
To comply with regulations and protocols to ensure that the patients in care institutions are looked after it has been necessary for staff to conduct manual checks of patients suffering from incontinence on a regular basis. Such manual checks are typically carried out whether or not the patient has suffered an incontinence event as often the patient is unwilling or unable to alert staff of the fact that an incontinence event has occurred. As can be appreciated, the need to conduct regular checks of patients for incontinence is a significant drain on the resources of the patient care institutions and also causes interruption to a patient's rest and sleep.
Incontinence indicators and detection systems exist. However, existing continence detection systems are generally unable to distinguish a urinary incontinence event from a faecal incontinence event. Nor are existing incontinence detection systems able to detect or determine useful information about incontinence events such as the volume of an incontinence event. The existing systems are deficient in that they may alert a staff member or carer of the fact that a wetness event has occurred but provide no practically useful information as to the size of the wetness event or of the quantity of wetness contained in an incontinence pad or diaper as a result of a series of wetness events. As a result, a staff member or carer may waste time or resources by having to check a patient on a regular basis to determine the size of a wetness event or the quantity of wetness contained in an absorbent pad or diaper in order to determine whether the absorbent pad or diaper requires changing. Accordingly, although existing systems can provide an alert when a wetness event occurs, this does not necessarily reduce the regularity with which a staff member or carer must check the patient.
Attempts to refine existing systems or develop new systems which are able to detect the type of event or the volume have been frustrated by difficulties to create an adequate simulation of the field environment for validating the systems during development. As a result, such systems have failed once deployed in actual care scenarios.
Attempts to use data collected in the field to analyse whether wetness events are urinary or faecal events or to obtain other useful information about wetness events have been frustrated by the fact that once there has been manual checking, by removing the absorbent article from the wearer and weighing the absorbent article, the absorbent article cannot be reused. This means that once the absorbent article has been removed subsequent wetness events cannot occur in the same absorbent article and be checked each time a wetness events takes place. Even if an absorbent article is removed from a wearer after each wetness event and weighed it is difficult to tell whether the volume of the wetness event as measured in the absorbent article corresponds to the volume associated with a single wetness event or a sequence of events.
The present invention seeks to ameliorate some or all of the problems set out above with existing methods and systems and to improve the efficiency of monitoring and management of incontinence by providing more information about the characteristics of incontinence events than has hitherto been possible with existing incontinence detection systems. Particularly, the present invention aims to improve upon the prior art methods and systems by detecting the occurrence of each event in a sequence of events and determining the size or volume of each individual event in an absorbent article, without the need to remove the pad from the wearer.
The present invention also aims to provide a method and a platform for information to be gathered by sensors detecting factors other than wetness with the aim of deriving information related to those other factors enabling other judgments or diagnoses to be made about patients. Accordingly, the present invention aims to improve the efficiency in monitoring and management of disabilities and disorders other than incontinence.